Our Drunken World

Welcome to Our Drunken World, a visualization of how alcoholic our world truly is.

We were interested in exploring alcohol consumptions around the world. There exist certain stereotypes about which countries drink which types of alcohol and we wanted to build a platform to either confirm or debunk these stereotypes with this visualization.

See more below

Data

In order to create this, we use data from the World Health Organization, which collected the average consumption of wine, beer, and spirits in liters per capita per year for every country. Our data spans from 1960 to 2010. The source can be found here.

Our Drunken World

Now let’s actually take a look at our visualization.

Map:

The map serves as a quick snapshot of the consumption levels around the world. Each country is encoded with a color which represents their consumption relative to the rest of the world, a lighter color represents less consumption and a darker color for heavier consumption.

Timeline:

We can also explore how consumption has changed from year to year by dragging our timeline or over time by hitting the play button.

Filters:

Different filters can be applied to look at how the world drinks different combinations, if you're interested in a more refined or targeted search.

Searchbar:

We can also select specific countries using the search bar, as opposed to clicking them on the map, if you are geographically challenged

Sidebar:

Clicking on a country will add it to the sidebar, allowing you to further compare different countries over time. This feature also works with our filters, allowing you to refine your search. If you click on each line graph, it’ll aggregate the selected types of alcohol, totaling the consumption.

Interesting Tidbits

Use our visualization to explore!

Try: Filter to just beer, and zooming in on Europe on the map.

If you look at all of Europe’s beer consumption, you can see that Eastern European countries do tend to drink more beer than their Western European counterparts (especially Germany, Luxembourg, France).

Try: Clicking on Libya.

Notice that there is a steep drop in alcohol consumption in Libya in 1970. This is right after Muammar Gaddafi took control of Libya in 1969, and banned alcohol to uphold Islamic traditions.

Try: Clicking on Russia.

Russia has quite a strange trend with their wine consumption. It turns out that after the Russian Revolution in 1917, French wine connoisseurs flocked to Russia to tap into the new market, so the wine industry grew. However, when the Soviet Union fell in the 1990s, the land vineyards were on was seen as more valuable if used for other crops. Thus, the Russian wine industry suffered. However, the Russians still had to drink, so we can see that they made up for that loss in wine by drinking more spirits.

While we had fun exploring alcohol stereotypes, we found we could also use this visualization to discover how alcohol consumption reflects the world’s history and culture.